A ruined factory in Hodeidah, Yemen after a Saudi-led airstrike in July 2018.
Photograph: Abdo Hyder/AFP/Getty Images

The killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi has placed the UK’s relationship with Saudi Arabia under an unprecedented level of scrutiny. Difficult though it may be to justify arming and supporting this violently repressive state – one that has helped to create the humanitarian disaster in Yemen – many in British politics are attempting to rise to that ignominious challenge, not least the government itself. They are aided by a series of myths about UK-Saudi relations, and misconceptions about just how important this relationship is to Britain strategically.

Many assume that UK-Saudi ties are all about oil, but only 3% of UK oil imports come from Saudi Arabia, with much consumption coming from our own reserves. In any case, given Saudi dependence on oil income, any use of the “oil weapon” – limiting supply – would rebound on Riyadh. What the British state and British capitalism really value is not Saudi oil, so much as the wealth generated by its sale.

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This leads to another misconception: that arms sales to Saudi Arabia are important to the British economy. But even in 2015-2016, a recent peak year for those sales, total exports of all goods and services to Saudi Arabia (military and non-military) made up just 1.3% of UK exports worldwide. The real value of arms sales is not to the economy as a whole, but more narrowly to the arms industry itself, 42% of whose exports went to Riyadh in the last decade. A domestic arms industry is required to meet London’s long-term commitment to remain a global military power, and to entrench strategic ties with allies such as the Saudis. But these commitments are, of course, a choice not a necessity.

The real economic value of Saudi Arabia is the trade surplus Britain has with it, and its role as a major source of inward investment. Both are important in addressing the large current account deficit that Britain has developed with the rest of the world since it adopted the neoliberal economic model, emphasising financial services over exports. Again, this is a choice, not a necessity.

A move away from neoliberalism, including the adoption of a full-scale industrial strategy, could narrow the current account deficit, reducing both the importance of the trade surplus with Saudi Arabia and the significance of “petrodollar” inflows. It is difficult to believe that with a proper industrial strategy, better and more morally defensible work could not be found for the highly skilled employees of Britain’s arms manufacturers.

The common suggestion that Riyadh could easily import arms from elsewhere if the UK were to stop supplying them fundamentally misunderstands the nature of what the UK and US provide: complex, state-of-the-art weapons systems, together with ongoing support to sustain their use. This cannot simply be replaced by Russia or China overnight. This is why Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former CIA analyst, said in 2016 that Washington and London could effectively pull the plug on the Saudis’ bombing of Yemen whenever they liked, since “the Royal Saudi Air Force cannot operate without American and British support”.

When ministers claim that counter-terrorism cooperation with Riyadh saves British lives, some retort that Saudi promotion of an extreme, minority form of Islam helps to create that threat in the first place. But beyond ideology, we should also consider the material conditions in which terrorism flourishes. The Saudis are the very embodiment of the corrupt, authoritarian and west-dependent rule that jihadism arose in response to, and the intervention in Yemen has helped expand precisely the sort of ungoverned space that those forces thrive in.

A final myth is that Saudi Arabia has an inherently different culture from ours, but that we are supporting the “reformers”. In reality, the Arabian peninsula is contested socio-political space, like everywhere else in the world, but for decades real reformers have faced the obstacle of repressive regimes armed to the teeth by the west. The only “reforms” those regimes have ever been interested in are those that consolidate their wealth and power.

Ties with the Saudi kingdom matter less to Britain as a whole than they do to a specific type of Britain: one with a neoliberal economic model and a post-imperial desire to retain its status as a military and strategic power in the world. The human costs of maintaining this alliance have become inescapable, and alternatives exist: it’s time to properly explore them.

• David Wearing is a teaching fellow in international relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain